The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order

By David Ekbladh

The Great American Mission traces how America's global modernization efforts during the twentieth century were a means to remake the world in its own image. David Ekbladh shows that the emerging concept of modernization combined existing development ideas from the Depression. He describes how ambitious New Deal programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority became symbols of American liberalism's ability to marshal the social sciences, state planning, civil society, and technology to produce extensive social and economic change. For proponents, it became a valuable weapon to check the influence of menacing ideologies such as Fascism and Communism.


Modernization took on profound geopolitical importance as the United States grappled with these threats. After World War II, modernization remained a means to contain the growing influence of the Soviet Union. Ekbladh demonstrates how U.S.-led nation-building efforts in global hot spots, enlisting an array of nongovernmental groups and international organizations, were a basic part of American strategy in the Cold War.


However, a close connection to the Vietnam War and the upheavals of the 1960s would discredit modernization. The end of the Cold War further obscured modernization's mission, but many of its assumptions regained prominence after September 11 as the United States moved to contain new threats. Using new sources and perspectives, The Great American Mission offers new and challenging interpretations of America's ideological motivations and humanitarian responsibilities abroad.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Aug 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781400833740

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The Great American Mission

AMERICA IN THE WORLD

SVEN BECKERT AND JEREMI SURI, series editors

Also in the Series

Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties

Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South

Ian Tyrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire

Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border

The

Great American Mission

MODERNIZATION AND THE

CONSTRUCTION OF AN

AMERICAN WORLD ORDER

David Ekbladh

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,

Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

Second printing, and first paperback printing, 2011

Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-15245-5

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

Ekbladh, David, 1972–

The great American mission: modernization and the construction

of an American world order / David Ekbladh

p.   cm.—(America in the world)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-13330-0 (hardcover : acid-free paper)

1. Economic development—United States—History. 2. Economic assistance,

American—History. 3. Industrial policy—United States—History. 4. United States—

Foreign economic relations. 5. United States—Foreign relations. I. Title.

HC110.E44E43    2010

338.91’73—dc22        2009014451

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

3   5   7   9   10   8   6   4   2

For Leah

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

The Rise of an American Style of Development, 1914–1937

CHAPTER 2

The Only Road for Mankind: Modernisation to Meet the Challenge of Totalitarianism, 1933–1944

CHAPTER 3

A Gospel of Liberalism: Point Four and Modernization as National Policy, 1943–1952

CHAPTER 4

The Proving Ground: Modernization and U.S. Policy in Northeast Asia, 1945–1960

CHAPTER 5

The Great American Mission: Modernization and the United States in the World, 1952–1960

CHAPTER 6

A TVA on the Mekong: Modernization at War in Southeast Asia, 1960–1973

CHAPTER 7

Everything Is Going Wrong: The Crisis of Development and the End of the Postwar Consensus

CHAPTER 8

New Developments: From the Cold War to the War on Terror

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

2.1. The Norns Dam

2.2. Mighty Dams Sprang Up

2.3. Electrical Modernization

2.4. David Lilienthal

2.5. Eugene Staley

3.1. An Arsenal of Ideas Too

4.1. New Textbooks Are Issued to South Korean Schoolchildren

4.2. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Gives a Check to Dag Hammarskjold

4.3. An Employee of Bechtel Corporation Oversees South Korean Workers

5.1. Worldwide High-Wire Act (David Lilienthal and John Blumberg)

5.2. The TVA’s World Offspring

5.3. Tanzanian Sightseers at Loudon Dam

5.4. Walt Rostow Playing Tennis

6.1. John Kennedy Speaks at Muscle Shoals

6.2. Peace Corps Volunteers Training in TVA Facilities

6.3. Lyndon Johnson, David Lilienthal, Walt Rostow, and Robert McNamera on Air Force One

7.1. David Lilienthal, the Shah of Iran, and Other Dignitaries

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEBTEDNESS makes the scholarly world go round. No project is ever fully the work of a single scholar. Therefore, it is a pleasure to owe as much as I do to the many who have helped this book become a reality. I knew when I started how important the help of others would be to my scholarship, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn how racking up such debts would enrich my professional and personal life.

A collection of institutions was instrumental to this project’s completion. Grants from the Eisenhower Institute, John F. Kennedy Institute, Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend program, Princeton University’s Library Fellows program, Rockefeller Archive Center, Smith Richardson Foundation, and Truman Library Institute made vital research and writing possible. The Earhart Foundation was particularly flexible, contributing a series of timely awards. The International Development Program and the Foreign Policy Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University generously provided a year in an invigorating interdisciplinary environment. There, Grace Goodell took an early interest in my work and has been a model of the complements teaching offers scholarship. She is also a peerless professional example and a trusted friend.

An Olin Postdoctoral Fellowship with International Security Studies at Yale University not only provided a wonderful perch to finish the bulk of the initial manuscript but also provided a lesson in scholarly community. While in residence there, my home was badly damaged by a fire. Immediately upon learning of this, Paul Kennedy and Ted Bromund offered their support. I am forever in their debt for the considerable resources that helped undo a nightmare of destroyed research materials and smokedamaged books.

Like every scholar, I was spoiled by the professionalism of the staff of the libraries and archives that were culled for this project. I am grateful to all, but I owe special thanks to Dan Linke and the staff at the Seeley G. Mudd Library; Tom Rosenbaum at the Rockefeller Archive Center; and Jonathan Green and Idelle Nissila at the Ford Foundation Archives.

This book grew out of my dissertation at Columbia University. The guidance and support I received from Anders Stephanson, Alan Brinkley, and Charles Armstrong marked the early contours of this project and my career. Frank Ninkovich was a model outside reader and has continued to offer beneficial advice. Michael Adas with his expansive scholarship and generous nature quickly outgrew the limited role of outside reader to become a valued friend and mentor.

An opportunity to work with the Carnegie Corporation of New York brought new perspectives and some valued relationships that continue to shape my views. David Hamburg provided a model for how scholarship leads to engagement with the issues in the world around us. David Speedie has been an abiding supporter. An unexpected delight was the fond concern Patricia Rosenfield took in my work and career. Her faithful attention and omnivorous mind have enriched me greatly.

Jim Mooney deserves special mention. At a difficult moment, he reached out to a young colleague, providing tricks of the trade, good humor, and sincere concern. Jim grew gravely ill as this book approached its final stages. Even so, he kept tabs on it and its author. It was a sign of the interest he took in all his students. His delight in teaching, in all forms, fostered life-long curiosity among those who learned from him. His death was a great loss. But Jim left a living memorial in his students, and I am honored to call myself one of them.

I have also been the recipient of vast professional largess. The input of David Armitage, Robert Beisner, Mark Berger, Nick Cullather, David Brion Davis, Bill Douglas, Lynn Eden, David Engerman, Frank Fukuyama, John Gaddis, Hiroshi Hori, Akira Iriye, Alan Kraut, Michael Latham, Mark Lawrence, Charles Maier, Erez Manela, Ernest May, Bruce Mazlish, David Painter, Tom Robertson, John Sewell, Brad Simpson, Frank Sutton, and Marilyn Young came in various forms and forums and refined my work considerably.

My students have extended my thinking in remarkable ways. Members of a seminar at Yale helped clarify some of my analysis. Other students have formally aided my research, and my thanks go to Vinny Intondi, Eden Knutsen, and Lindsay Schakenbach for the good work they provided. Jordan Segall deserves special mention for his incomparable thoroughness and enthusiasm as a research assistant.

My new home at Tufts University has brought a rapid addiction to the collegial atmosphere sustained by the history department and the campus community generally. Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe, Jeff Berry, Ben Carp, Annette Lazzara, Gary Leupp, Howard Malchow, Beatrice Manz, Andrew McCellan, Jeanne Penvenne, Alisha Rankin, Tony Smith, and Ichiro Takayoshi, among others, remind me that a supportive environment is more than worth the considerable individual efforts devoted to its maintenance.

Great thanks rightly belong to the series editors Jeremi Suri and Sven Beckert, as well as to Brigitta von Rheinberg and Clara Platter at Princeton University Press. They were flexible with deadlines upended by fire and patient with a new author.

Friends inside and outside the guild of history were invaluable. I learned to depend on the good humor and support of Chris Capozzola, Matt Raffety, Thea Hunter, Michelle Dhanda, Erika McEntarfer, Susan Brewton, Leah Werchick, Rosalind Glatter, Lisa Foulda, Kerr Houston, Karen Stern, Ezra Gabbay, and Mike Williamson. My obligations are steep to Eric Yellin, a superb friend who has shown surprising and reverential talents. He has a match in another dear friend and exceptional scholar, Nicole Sackley.

For everything these people and institutions gave to me for this project, in the end, the conclusions are entirely my own.

It is unlikely that any of these conclusions would have been reached without my family. The whole extended clan of my sisters, brothers-inlaw, mother- and father-in-law, niece and nephew, and parents did the simplest yet most important of things—they never entertained a doubt about this project or my career. They were also the deepest reservoirs of support, concern, and good cheer.

Above all there is my wife, Leah. We met on a rooftop in Washington and discovered common interests and affection on an evening that neither of us wanted to end. I have since learned that the light of her mind is equal to the incandescence of her smile. As our lives blended together she became the greatest partisan, critic, and muse for my work. The humor, richness, and joy she has brought to my life have made me realize that wonderful night never did end. It is to her that this book, as well as myself, is dedicated.

—Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2009

ABBREVIATIONS

The Great American Mission

INTRODUCTION

Make no little plans: they have no magic to stir men’s

blood… Make big plans: aim high in hope and work.

—Daniel Burnham, 1908. Quoted by Eugene Staley

THROUGHOUT HIS LONG CAREER, Eugene Staley often quoted Daniel Burnham and his maxim of make no little plans. Unintentionally, Staley was revealing much about himself and the ideas with which he surrounded himself during the mid-twentieth century. An economist by training, Staley ranged the globe working on the stirring and critical mission of international development when its resonance on the world scene was at its height. On the surface, Staley might not seem a peer of Burnham, the architect responsible for the dramatic Chicago Exhibition of 1893. But both men shared a faith in modernity, particularly its American example. Burnham, too, carried this faith abroad. It is no surprise that Staley, who believed in development as both a humanitarian need to adjust societies to the pressures of an all-encompassing modern world and a critical means to contain ideologies that would pull peoples away from the healthy means to achieve progress, found a kindred spirit in Burnham.

Nothing about the ideas and policies that Staley and ranks of others flung into the world was little. Their ambitions and goals were as vast as the process to which they committed. To ensure that their methods to achieve a future brightened by the hallmarks of modernity were chosen by other peoples, they did indeed have to stir men’s blood. Pulses would be quickened by standards of living raised by the application of technology. Power plants, dams, roads, bridges, and a host of other massive expressions of applied science offered revolutionary commodities that would change how people lived. New ways of living would emerge as people bent their personal existences to the opportunities and the boundaries marked by these forces. Change would be constant and it would be as intimate as it was vast.

Guiding progress was not a new concept when Staley took up the task. For Americans the concept went well back into their history. But, unintentionally, Burnham’s words evoke the qualitative difference in the efforts during the twentieth century. Behind them lay the big plan. For Burnham, plans meant ambitions, but for his successors, planning in relation to development implied the marshalling and management (often by government authorities) of resources for a particular goal. The concept of planning and assumptions about the role of the state and society lay behind the approaches to development promulgated in the period. It mattered under what political regimes these large-scale projects claiming the imprimatur of planning would be implemented. Politics and ideology were at the center because these decided where development would lead and where societies would be delivered at the end of their journey. Particular projects might claim dispassionate, objective origins with technical or social scientific analysis to ease implementation and quiet dissent, but the larger ideological framework in which any program delivered is always present.¹ Because of the deep roots of politics in development, it has long been an electric topic (as has scholarship on it) with passionate judgments on the efficacy of one doctrine or another being the currency of debate.

Development reflects the political milieu from which it springs. Accordingly, it was instrumental in the ideological struggles of the twentieth century. Liberalism, communism, and fascism—those systems with broad prescriptions for the organization of political, social, cultural, and economic life—were impelled to demonstrate to their home populations as well as to the international public that they could deliver on the promises of a better life, brought about by the technologies and the outlooks of the modern world. Here development becomes crucial to understanding how the United States confronted other ideological systems when they emerged as threats. It has particular relevance to the Cold War, which now dominates scholarship in modern international history. As scholarship on the Cold War heaves from a focus on origins to a more nuanced discussion of how it was waged, a clutch of historians have seen the importance of development to a struggle that is characterized as being a struggle between two ideological systems—liberal capitalism and state communism. Proving the efficacy of their respective ideologies was a necessity and drove each side to intervene across the globe.² These interventions varied. Among the many ways the powers sought to exert control over the newly categorized Third World was development. Both sides sought transformation in the new states as a way to demonstrate that their ideologies were best suited to deliver the benefits of modern life. Scholars have rightly seen that while modernization shared a lineage with colonialism, its application in the twentieth century held distinctions from modern empire. It was not driven by unalloyed exploitation and subjection but rather sought control and improvement. However, this hardly meant it was pure. Modernization is deeply implicated in what has more aptly been described as the establishment of American global hegemony.³ The project that modernization served in the twentieth century was not always humanitarian, but strategic. Vigorous new scholarship has demonstrated how modernization served as a powerful lens, justification, and weapon for the United States in a vast cold war.⁴ This meant the scope, goals, and even promise of modernization were constrained and sometimes compromised by the demands of policies cut for global combat. Promises of a better life were mixed with actions that could be coercive and, sometimes, blisteringly violent. It is a reality that has persisted as development has persisted in global affairs beyond the Cold War. This is not to call into question the motives or actions of many individuals who were honestly committed to supporting the ambitions of others to improve their lot. What it does do is describe the framework that shaped how modernization was conceived and applied.

If development was a weapon in the ideological combat that was the Cold War, then its proximate origins must be understood. Much scholarly work on the topic remains firmly rooted in the Cold War and does not demur to accepted narratives of development in the era. Development as it is presently understood, as well as the foreign aid offered by various countries to foster it, is regularly given origins in the years after 1945 by a diverse chorus of voices. It is linked to the start of official aid programs tied to the Truman Doctrine in 1947.⁵ Several have even picked a specific date, January 20, 1949, when President Harry Truman announced his global Point Four assistance program. With that speech, the United States abruptly defined much of the world freeing itself of colonial rule as underdeveloped. In this schema, emergence from this historical status could only be accomplished through American aid. Such a simple and easily definable takeoff point has led a number of scholars to declare the late 1940s the starting line for inquiry. This beginning is a simple and (for some) politically palatable means of demarcation. Freed from fetters of the past, all else becomes a prehistory.⁶

This is not to impugn fine scholarship but to remind that the concept of development has no clear beginning in the U.S. case or internationally. As scholars often acknowledge, pinpointing the absolute, single beginning of any broad historical issue is a difficult task.⁷ Elements of the faith in guiding change that constitutes the core development have been in play in some form for quite some time. In fact, the term modernization has been used, albeit to convey different meanings, at least since the late 1700s. The assertion here is not that modernization, as a conscious set of policies to promote improvement and progress, began in the 1930s, but that a vital new formulation crystallized. This shift was critical in reshaping thinking, policy, and action on development in ways that continue to resonate in the present. It is important to explicate the changes that mark departures and refine our understanding of how such a broad theme emerges and operates on the global stage. The type of modernization that played such a powerful role in the Cold War waged by the United States was not actually specific to it. The grand plans that endeavored to lay down great technological monuments, alter nature, and, most important, to transform human perceptions had firm links to the years before the conflict. Ideas and methods that would play vital roles in U.S. policy formed in the 1930s and 1940s, with a set of emerging approaches to foster development through, as contemporaries sometimes referred to it, the reconstruction of modern societies. In those crisis years, liberals came to a new consensus on development. There was another crucial shift—that development, seen as worldwide in its scope, had a direct, strategic rationale. Liberals were also prepared to counter threats posed by other ideological systems that also had programs of global development. These ideas had immediate use as a means to tamp the appeal of fascism and communism, by demonstrating liberalism’s ability to deliver the benefits of the modern world to people at home and abroad. Concepts necessary to actually implement such development emerged from a collection of sources, particularly New Deal reform and nongovernmental activity. These approaches were mobilized and integrated into strategy and official policy. What some began to label modernisation was integrated into a globalism itself based in the necessity of American world leadership.

Nominating an approach to development that privileged large-scale transformation as a means to contain ideological threats to liberal society marked a crucial moment of departure. Modernization ideas worked their way into Cold War policies, they were not created by them. A struggle that is increasingly remembered as a global competition between two ideological systems required each to demonstrate its ability to promote social and economic progress.⁸ This was especially true for the United States, a nation believing itself the archetype of modern technological society and a pillar of liberalism—ideas that easily segued into long held views that it was a city on the hill for others to emulate.⁹ But the template for using development as part of an ideological struggle had been laid down during the crisis years of the 1930s and 1940s. While the Cold War is vital to understanding the maturation and extension of many of these concepts, the fact that many methods and institutions had a defined role before the confrontation reveals new avenues to explore the increasing global influence of the United States in the last century.

A consensus (as contemporaries sometimes referred to it) on development during the mid-twentieth century accepted that development be broadly conceived, embracing whole countries and regions if need be, and based on large-scale planning. It held great affection for technology—particularly grand industrial edifices—as both the means and ends of the process. The aim was to have extensive and profound impacts on societies. Technologies were sought to provide material benefits, but these were also means to promote human change. For example, dams and power plants were sought after because they offered electricity with perpetual economic and personal use. However, the current provided would change the most humble individuals, altering daily patterns of life and with them a person’s perceptions of the world and their place in it. Here, this wideranging idea of development dives into the psychological where development becomes the modernization of mind. Individuals, as part of this larger process, had to incorporate modern outlooks on intimate levels for the process to proceed and succeed.

International development is, by its nature, global in scope. For much of the period discussed here, industrial society, seen as the culmination of modernity, was assumed to be reaching into every society to eventually embrace the entire world. The question was exactly how that transition, fraught with political, economic, and social consequences, would be managed. It is in this global dialogue about development that U.S. formulations have to be placed. In the twentieth century there were other strong and appealing options to bring modernity to heel. Fascism and communism were just two of the most powerful and appealing of these. While self-consciously opposed to liberalism, these systems shared many basic assumptions about development. Observers at the time and scholars since have noted how, in the twentieth century, the universalizing ideologies of the left, right, and center had affection for high technology and the thoroughgoing transformation its application would bring to the people it touched.¹⁰ Foundational to the United States accepting a new and intensified mission of development was the presence of countervailing development models. For Americans, the existence of such models was a potentially dire threat to world order. These systems, even if they shared a taste for large dams, electricity, the reshaping of individual psychology, or a barrage of other modern techniques, were necessarily fraught with social and political dangers. As politics could never be divorced from development, if these other ideologies with their own ambitions to remake the globe prevailed, the benefits of modern life could be lost. Indeed, they might even become tools of oppression and destruction. These global questions always lurk in the background of the story of how America attempted to mold the contours of world development. What is more, the challenge of other models served as justification for intense U.S. efforts to promote its own vision of modernity and in so doing aided the extension of its own global power and influence.

Over the course of this competition, preponderant resources and influence of the United States left indelible marks on institutions and ideas that continue to shape international development. Accordingly, the story becomes a cis-international history, to modify a thoughtful schema from the vibrant field of Atlantic History. Plurality inherent to international and global history requires a multiplicity of approaches. Atlanticists have profitably grappled with the interconnections of a vast region, explaining how peoples, states, commerce, and ideas have swirled together and in so doing have blurred once sacrosanct historical boundaries. However, this wider view does not remove influences emerging from specific historical and geographical points. Particular localities, nations, or regions can be discussed within a larger international framework. It acknowledges the uniqueness of the experience and influence of one site while exposing linkages to bigger structures and ideas indispensable for contextualizing that site in its historical milieu. Discussing how one segment of the international community—in this case the United States—interacts, refracts, and is itself influenced by international trends is a profitable means to interrogate the history of a larger global issue like development.¹¹

While the tale is international, it cannot forsake domestic roots. Examples for how development might be performed abroad were provided legitimacy by apparent reform successes inside the United States. It is remarkable how domestic reform is regularly walled off as a separate fiefdom from international efforts seeking to foster similar changes with similar methods. This boundary is often artificial, as the two are constantly in dialogue if not directly connected. Modernization occurred at home at the same time and it was influenced by international trends and debates on the issues. For example, domestic debates about the state’s role in economic and social life directly influenced the course of international activity and vice versa. Organizations and many individuals committed to development moved fluidly between the domestic and international because both spheres shared many assumptions about how to foster change.

The reality of interdependence is driven home when the role of civil society and private institutions is seen. A mosaic of foundations, voluntary groups, missionaries, advocacy groups, and universities (grouped under the catchall rubric of nongovernmental organizations—NGOs) as well as businesses was essential to the process. All brought skills and resources to programs at home and abroad that were vital to their completion. Often, the story of international development focuses on the role of government such that nonstate actors, when acknowledged, are cast as supporting players or co-conspirators. Private groups were not mere adjuncts or toadies to government action. For the United States, a long history of a comparatively weak central state with halting interest in overseas development was offset by vibrant civil society activism. Many nonstate groups remained committed when official interest waned. At certain moments, NGOs were the most attentive to the concept and cultivated the most innovative thinking.

When the U.S. government committed to a program of coordinated, permanent modernization in the years following World War II, it immediately turned to the expertise of these private groups. In growing numbers, they played indispensable roles in development projects. This is not to say that there was no disagreement or dissent between these groups and government (and among the groups themselves), but these private organizations embraced many of the principles guiding consensus development. International institutions were also part of this larger equation. Such institutions, particularly the United Nations, played an essential role in the process. They too adhered to consensus principles, in no small measure because the UN and its litter of specialized agencies were created and invested with a development mission at a time when the consensus held sway. The story of development in this period, even when focused on the United States, is a wide one that must include this collection of historical actors.

The continuing indispensability of development in global affairs and U.S. foreign policy warrants investigation of the history that shaped its present form. International development is a broad, diffuse idea and it defies attempts to mark a single moment of origin. What can be done is to trace its lineage to expose its composition and operation at particular historical moments. The revived importance of development in international affairs at the start of the twenty-first century makes an understanding of the modernization that predominated for much of the twentieth century vital. It was an evolution heavily influenced by ideas and groups emerging from the United States, which embraced a consensus on development. This consensus, prevailing from roughly the 1930s through the 1970s, was adopted and cultivated by private and governmental organizations to implement a mission overseas. Its legacy would have lasting impacts on how international development would be conceptualized and implemented. It is impossible to comprehend contemporary international development without comprehending the contributions of the United States.

The arc of the evolution and impact of these ideas on development and international politics can best be seen by taking a wider and longer view, a view that can be profitably centered on U.S. interaction with Asia. Focusing here does not mean these concepts were not applied elsewhere. In Latin America, Africa, Europe, and even North America, groups sought to utilize the principles in the development consensus to shape peoples and nations in their own image. Important aspects of the story told here can be seen in operation in these parts of the world. Asia, however, would see the largest and most intense application of these ideas while the consensus held sway. Several sites in Asia could also make claims to being the largest development programs in the world at crucial historical junctures.

In the 1910s and 1920s, new development ideas pairing modern applied technologies with the new social sciences began to emerge. Such methods were closely tied to the global progressive movement. International in origin, they found strong adherents within the United States. It was often nonstate groups who were in the vanguard of applying these new concepts to the problem of development. Overseas, a transition can be seen in the efforts of missionary and secular volunteers to transform a medieval China into a modern nation. What was lacking was an overarching model for a set of practices that were increasingly being marked by an exceptionalist American vision, yet were seen as universal in their application.

Within the New Deal—itself a hybrid of domestic and international reform ideas to meet a global crisis—development advocates found the model they sought. The Tennessee Valley Authority melded existing thinking and technologies for development into a comprehensive and politically palatable package. It also appeared at a moment when liberals sought to secure their legitimacy at home and abroad from the ideological challenges of both fascism and communism. The TVA stood as proof that large-scale multipurpose development, invested in state planning and dependent on technology that was international in its origins, could be blended with liberal political ideas claiming a singular American origin to produce rapid social and economic change. Its structure also accepted the cooperation of nongovernmental groups. Supporters soothed fears about state power and planning with what became known as the TVA creed. Their formulations served to set this liberal model of development apart from strikingly similar communist and fascist development ideas. These characteristics also justified universal claims of exportability to all parts the globe. The TVA was a grand synecdoche, standing for a wider liberal approach to economic and social development both domestically and internationally. Its example was absorbed into a reformulated international development meant to secure the pale of liberal life against totalitarian challengers with their own blueprints for modernity. Global war continued the ideological combat and offered the opportunity to refine these ideas as they were put to work fostering reconstruction and development worldwide.

As world war gave way to cold war, development ideas were mobilized as a means to secure and extend an American-dominated liberal order. The TVA remained an expression of American mastery of applied technology within a liberal political framework. Newly titled modernization, this activity was ongoing from the end of the war. This type of development was consciously set apart from aid, however massive, to rebuild states already seen as modern, such as Germany and Japan. It became increasingly important as the United States began to counter Soviet influence in underdeveloped areas of the globe. Because of this, the state became increasingly involved in areas where nongovernmental groups had been the leading lights. The U.S. government therefore sought to forge cooperative links with private organizations that held considerable experience in applying these concepts. The United Nations also evolved a development mission, often through American initiatives. Harry Truman’s announcement of his Point Four program in 1949 placed modernization in a prominent spot in the grand strategy of the American state.

South Korea became a proving ground for these modernization ideas. Even before the announcement of Point Four, South Korea was a test bed for the broad spectrum of modernization concepts. These efforts dramatically accelerated after the start of the Korean War. Advocates were clear that programs in South Korea were far more than recovery from war damage; they were viewed as an accelerated program of development. The United States saw to it that the UN, with its new development agencies, and a host of NGOs were inserted in the vast efforts to remake South Korea. It became the largest development effort in the world in the 1950s, but consensus ideas did not produce the rapid change they promised.

During that decade, development took on increased importance to American foreign policy and society at large as decolonization accelerated and the confrontation with the Soviet Union deepened. Although the U.S. government oscillated in its approach to international development, various private groups remained strongly committed to the project. There was a rapid expansion of nonstate activity in the 1950s that mirrored an increasing feeling that modernization was a key mission of the United States and a gauge of national success or failure in waging the Cold War. Nonstate groups became powerful advocates and saw to it that consensus ideas remained in mainstream foreign policy. Despite mounting activity, attractive communist models for national development and troubles implementing American ideas injected frustration and doubt into a critical theater of the Cold War.

The Kennedy years brought renewed emphasis and optimism on the modernization front. Modernization ideas began to drift back into American domestic life as social science methods worked out overseas were deployed to deal with nagging issues of race and poverty. Abroad, apparent success in South Korea led Americans to believe that a modern, anticommunist nation could be built in South Vietnam. Modernization was enlisted in counterinsurgency efforts. Lyndon Johnson put great stock in a TVA-style program to help quell conflict in the riparian nations in Southeast Asia while assuring the international community of the positive aspects of American involvement. This, and postwar planning for the development of South Vietnam, were prominent components of U.S. efforts to justify its presence in the region. All were based on the tenets of the consensus on development. However, war exposed limits to the approach, strained relations with NGOs, and soured opinions toward the type of large-scale technological programs the United States advocated.

The unpopular war in Vietnam helped to discredit many of the development ideas intimately connected to it. Frustrations with development were coupled with an increasingly vocal environmental movement that questioned whether the massive technological programs, so favored in the postwar period, best met the needs of people in poorer areas. Voices across the political spectrum and the globe questioned many of the assumptions behind mainstream development. Frustrations with development raised questions as to whether the massive technological programs, so favored in the postwar period, best met the needs of people in poorer areas. Part of this shift was a growing distrust of the state to be the primary agent to promote development. Out of this crisis of development a new concept emerged that emphasized environmental needs and a focus on poverty, preparing the ground for talk of sustainable development. The official U.S. foreign aid program was radically changed in response to the searing experience of Vietnam. However, other international institutions, especially the World Bank, would be consciously pushed forward by the United States and other wealthy nations. The multilateral development approach claimed by the Bank was seen to hold fewer political costs. After the tumult of the period the Bank emerged as the central institution in a chastened international development community.

By the 1970s, the consensus on modernization that had been cultivated by the United States had been shattered. Statist programs, planning, and the large-scale transformation that had characterized modernization’s heyday were viewed with a jaundiced eye. In fact, the concept of modernization fell out of fashion, because of its close associations with Cold War thinking, ethnocentrism, and cultural imperialism.¹² With the end of the Cold War, foreign aid declined in importance. Development, in general, was fractured and lacked a clear rationale and set of approaches to guide its implementation. Its decline provides a coda to modernization’s mission in the twentieth century. Still, it is hard to provide a tidy conclusion for a set of ideas that had such powerful sway on international affairs. With the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the War on Terror that followed, development aid was shoved back into the spotlight. Many ideas and institutions that had lain dormant in international affairs insinuated their way back into American strategy and the agenda of the international community. Nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with a hope that development would stifle the appeal of extremist ideologies and the movements they stirred, again gave development a new mission to mold the world in an American image.

Considering the breadth of this study, it makes no claim to be an exhaustive history of international development or even U.S. overseas aid activity during the period discussed. Programs and thinking were diverse, and Americans were involved in all parts of the globe with the aim of bringing a version of modernity to people they considered less developed. My research focuses on how many Americans conceptualized what needed to be done to reform various societies at different historical moments. I write with full knowledge that there remains considerable work for historians in defining how the vast and varied modernization programs of the twentieth century actually operated. Connected to this, there is much discussion here of how Americans perceived various societies as backwards and requiring aid. This should not be taken as a statement of what conditions actually were in all situations. American observers were prone to statements colored by their own bias, racism, ignorance, enthusiasm, and cynicism. The goal here is to describe what U.S. perceptions motivated and then shaped actual modernization policy and activity. Although outside of the scope of the study, people within the countries receiving U.S. aid were not passive recipients of these ideas. In various forms, they negotiated, collaborated with, or resisted these schemes—all actions that actively shaped outcomes.¹³

Ideas matter. It is a bland truism to note that they motivate and legitimate action. One goal of this work is to open the way for a deeper discussion of the nexus of interaction between ideas and deeds that development demands. Instrumental to liberal modernization was thinking, global in its scope and focused on planning, growth, and change that was drawn into and Americanized by the New Deal. It is indeed striking how often the reputation of the reform movement and the flagship TVA were utilized to make one approach to international development comprehensible to various constituencies worldwide. Equally telling are the globetrotting careers of numerous advocates who found modernization a compelling mission in the postwar period. However, the goal is neither to supply a traditional intellectual history of modernization nor to track the international career of the TVA or a catalog of individuals who projected many of these ideas into the world. It is to look at how a broader liberal vision of development emerged and was utilized by the United States to confront threats internationally. The recurring stories of individuals and the influence of various models are used to demonstrate the continuity of concepts in the liberal development consensus over time and space. This study happily acknowledges that there are more facets to the extensive historical theme of development. There are numerous other perspectives that might be heard. This study is humbly offered as one element in a wider discussion of the profoundly diverse global history of development.

If the scope is vast, the terms are also tricky. While usage of the word modernization goes back to the eighteenth century, its contemporary meanings are a relatively recent phenomenon. Not listed in the massive Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences that appeared in 1933, the term only made an appearance in the revised edition of the encyclopedia in 1968.¹⁴ Closely related to development, what constituted modernization in the twentieth century is more easily defined. It was regularly seen as an attempt to achieve modernity, which is what is up-to-date at a specific time. Typically, it was Western forms that defined what was seen as current, and those forms were contrasted against traditional ideas and structures within a society.¹⁵ It put great stock in science and its application, but important parts of a modern society were not just technology but the outlooks of its members. Modernity required certain institutions, technologies, and infrastructure and, just as important, that individuals accept an elaborate division of labor, considerable personal mobility, impersonality in daily interactions, and a forward-looking worldview, as opposed to traditional outlooks of passivity or fatalism.¹⁶ Admittedly, these perceptions were closely tied to the application of technology and a type of society shaped by technological imperatives. Nevertheless, in important respects, modernization was a social process. In the words of one prominent member of the school of modernization theory, Alex Inkeles, men are not born modern but are made so by their life experience.¹⁷ Modernity, simply put, was in your head. In the period discussed, modernization was widely approached as a historical question. Traditional societies were viewed as backwards and separated by time from the exemplars of modernity in Western Europe and the United States. However, with outside aid they could traverse this historical gap to embrace modern relationships, institutions, and outlooks through a process of modernization.

Development is a more amorphous concept and has no single agreed upon definition. However, it does imply a far-reaching, continuous, and positively evaluated process of social, economic and political change which involves the totality of human experience.¹⁸ Development is closely bound up with the larger idea of social change and progress implicit in modern societies. It may be seen as a broader concept than modernization, indeed, one in which modernization is subsumed. At its base, it implies a process to guide progress (or simply change)—a development leading to a set of new occurrences or relationships. Nevertheless, in this study, I use modernization and development as those in the post-World War II period did, as nearly synonymous terms. Each term was then used to describe a process assumed to be broad and transformative on many levels. It was only in the 1960s and 1970s, as modernization came under increasing attack from numerous quarters, that the terms were regularly treated as different, if interrelated, concepts. The outside aid used to foster this development was also diverse. It came from various institutional and state (and even individual) sources but also lay under various monikers. Particularly as aid became more official (meaning dominated by state institutions) after World War II, various branches emerged. Categories of capital, technical assistance, educational, food, military, and other kinds of foreign aid were defined. While not ignoring these important distinctions, this study treats aid aimed at promoting change within a society as developmental in content and goal.

The diversity of development aid and the institutions invested in it ensured that the ideas emerging out of the consensus had effects across U.S. and international society. This study puts a basic theme of international life into a wider historical frame. Modernization has both a longer history and a continuing legacy. A historical view emphasizing the evolution of the process and practice of development reveals how important elements are products of historical moments during the twentieth century. Much activity was never entirely the province of the state, long operating on numerous levels and influenced by a host of actors—from NGOs to international organizations. Understanding that multiple actors traditionally have been responsible for executing development programs complicates the narrative. Such plurality also explains the concept’s endurance on the international scene. It helps explain how the concept of development has been retooled to fit a new world situation. Understanding how development was brought to bear in the international arena at different historical moments by the United States allows indispensable insight into the history of a powerful international theme and provides critical perspective on how it relates to the world today.

Chapter 1

THE RISE OF AN AMERICAN STYLE OF DEVELOPMENT, 1914-1937

We [the United States] are doing this for your own good.

—Victor Heiser, 1936

THE IDEAS AND PRACTICES that would comprise modernization were extant well before the term earned its common currency in the years following World War II. New approaches were emerging from the social sciences and the institutions that were their incubators that would transform how reformers conceptualized the needs of societies they saw demanding their intervention. These attitudes were a departure from what had come before, but that is not to say they did not have a history. No matter how new the methods, the impulse to development had a long heritage in international life and in an American self-concept that embraced a mission to serve as an example for the world. In the United States, the new development was connected historically to projects to reconstruct societies at home and abroad to respond to the modern world. This legacy set the stage for the changes that would course into development activity in the years following World War I. Much of the initiative for these changes came from nongovernmental groups, and their largest and most visible testing grounds would be China. Americans, as part of a community of international progressives, increasingly saw the need for large-scale programs moved by the social sciences and utilizing imposing technologies to promote widespread social and political change. As the world sank into crisis during the 1930s, they had a set of concepts buttressing a liberal approach to development; all they required was something that embodied their agenda in a single example.

ROOTS OF MODERNIZATION

The development concepts that predominated in the mid-twentieth century can find roots in European thought contending with the difficulties of industrialization and demographic shifts in the early nineteenth century. Henri Saint-Simon and his disciples are considered crucial to the formulation of a doctrine of development. Seeing the disorder and waste of early European industrialization, the Saint-Simonians did not ask whether advancement was necessary or possible but whether it could have been achieved more rapidly and effectively than under the prevailing laissezfaire system. The most prominent member of the Saint-Simonians, Auguste Comte, believed that order must be brought to the disjointed industrial progress of his time. Development, for Comte, was the basis